• Question: do you agree with cloning?

    Asked by niamh:) to David, Gemma, Juhi, Matt, Stéphane, Yinka on 9 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: David Howard

      David Howard answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      Personally I don’t see the need to clone whole organisms. However, if we are able to clone specific organs that replace those of diseased ones, and with less chance of the recipient rejecting the transplant, then I think that is a positive use of cloning.

    • Photo: Stéphane Berneau

      Stéphane Berneau answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      Yes, would agree with using cloning in therapeutics. However, in Humans, it is not ethical yet.

      Have you heard about iPS stem cells? Adult and differentiated human cells which are reprogrammed to be stem cell-like. This should help for a better future to cure diseases.

      If you have any questions, do not hesitate

    • Photo: Gemma Chandratillake

      Gemma Chandratillake answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      Plants clone themselves all the time (and we clone them too e.g. taking a cutting instead of using seeds). Fungi can also reproduce without sex (apparently the fungus that causes Athlete’s Foot is all clonal now).
      I assume what you mean is cloning humans though? Identical twins are essentially clones but you can see that they’re not actually completely identical, they are different people, because genetics isn’t everything. So, in some ways, I am not as worried about it as some folks are because you can’t really recreate yourself through cloning.
      We don’t yet have the technical expertise to clone humans by somatic cell nuclear transfer (the way Dolly the Sheep was made), and I don’t think it is a good use of human eggs to spend a lot of time trying (I think where the eggs come from is probably one of the biggest ethical challenges to cloning at the moment). By this method, you have to wait years for the new human to grow up too, so it’s not very practical. I think the most useful type of “cloning” though is to make new tissue that is identical to the patient that you are trying to treat. This can be done by taking adult cells and making them become stem cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) and then making them turn into the tissue that you need. In this way you could make new tissues and even organs for transplant in the lab that don’t get rejected by the patient’s immune system. That is a really big deal with lots of medical applications. You can take this one step further for people with genetic disease and do genetic engineering on the stem cells you get from them to correct the genetic mistake and then grow new tissue for them that is genetically identical to them except for the one change that causes their disease. This is an example of this sort of process (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/boy-rare-disease-gets-new-skin-thanks-gene-corrected-stem-cells) and I think there is a huge amount of potential for this sort of “gene therapy” for people with genetic disease.

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